Our colleagues at Réseau Semence Paysannes published a press communication in response to the Israeli government’s destruction of the seeds bank in Hébron, Palestine. You can access the document on this post, or read the translate version below:
Réseau Semence Paysannes, made up of more than eighty organisations, all involved in initiatives to promote and defend cultivated biodiversity and associated know-how, wishes to reiterate the importance of preserving, multiplying and circulating peasant seeds. Seeds are a response to current environmental and social challenges.
It is in this context that it strongly condemns the destruction on 31 July 2025 of the Palestinian seed farm in Hebron in the West Bank by the Israeli army. On 31 July 2025, the Israeli army bulldozed the infrastructure of a seed production farm belonging to the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), one of the largest agricultural development institutions in Palestine, in Hebron in the West Bank. This production unit was responsible for multiplying part of the collection of farmers’ seeds managed by the UAWC seed bank.
Destroying seeds, the basis of all food, is tantamount to subjugating a people and a country and compromising any possibility of building a viable state. It also represents an irreversible loss of cultivated biodiversity for global agriculture as a whole.
This act of war reveals the Israeli government’s determination to condemn the Palestinian population to a life in refugee camps and deny them food sovereignty. This deliberate violence against civil society as a whole aims to make any form of lasting peace impossible, at a time when several states have decided to recognise the Palestinian state.
In line with its international commitments, Réseau Semence Paysannes condemns this act of war and calls on all its members and supporters to support a movement of solidarity with Palestinian peasant farmers so that they have access to peasant seeds that enable them to feed their populations in accordance with their agricultural culture, which has co-evolved with climate change. We are awaiting feedback from the UAWC in order to adapt the Network’s factual response to this unacceptable situation.
The Board of Réseau Semence Paysannes
RSP Press release (French version)
You can also read more about the destruction of the seed bank here: https://viacampesina.org/en/2025/08/destruction-of-the-hebron-seed-bank-peasant-organizations-across-regions-express-outrage/
